Cebaf May Help Local Businesses

New Products Will Be Emerging

April 25, 1991|By DAVID RESS Staff Writer

NEWPORT NEWS — Helping build the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility could give local firms a leg up in eight emerging, multi-million dollar markets in the next decade, a senior CEBAF executive said Wednesday.

H. Frederick Dylla, associate manager of CEBAF's accelerator division, told a local conference on technology business that the facility is eager to work with businesses in developing new products.

CEBAF general counsel John G. Mullin said the facility was on the verge of signing its first licensing agreement, with Hampton-based Pressure Systems Inc. The agreement will allow Pressure Systems to sell other companies one piece of equipment similar to that which CEBAF will use to handle super-cooled material.

CEBAF will cool its accelerator with material chilled to within a few degrees of absolute zero - minus 459.67 degrees, the point at which molecules are supposed to stop moving.

Dylla said the market for all the various types of super-cooling equipment CEBAF will use could reach $100 million in 10 years.

Building the facility, which will be used for basic research into the nature of matter, also demanded high-powered engineering services and development of super-conducting materials, magnets and cavities, Dylla said.

Each of these three areas could spin off into commercial applications with its own $100-million market within 10 years, he said.

Dylla said making products from niobium - a rare metal used in the accelerator - could develop into a $10-million business in the next decade. Learning to work the metal, now mostly used in steel alloys, has been a hard task, he said.

He said control systems for high-energy electron beams and the specialized microwave components used at the facility could also each develop into $10-million markets within 10 years.

CEBAF also had to develop a high-powered computer system, capable of continuously monitoring 100,000 pieces of information, Dylla said.

He said CEBAF has helped 10 other non-profit institutions adopt its computer system, and is now looking for a private company to market the system commercially.

CEBAF reckons that this, too, could be a $10-million market within 10 years, he said.

In the longer term, Dylla said he expected expertise developed by CEBAF scientists on high-energy electron and light flows could be applied to make more efficient electronic circuits, fiber optics and photochemistry.

CEBAF is also learning how to make more efficient - and smaller - particle accelerators, he said. That means that the same basic technique CEBAF scientists will use to explore atomic structure - shooting high-energy beams at them - could also eventually be used in factories, he said.